Partial Sovereign Bodies - Presentation of an artistic research and joint discussion.

In the context of the „Labor für gelungene Abhängigkeiten“, I would like to explore the question of agency within new and future entanglements of humans and technology. Together with the participants, I would like to discuss the concept of agency and apply it to contemporary human-technology relationships. Together we could make an assemblage that makes the network structures between the different human and non-human actors more visible and thus more accessible.

Many of our social roles carry a self-understanding of ourselves that conveys autonomous action and thus full self-responsibility. This is expressed in the principle of the rule of law, which identifies citizens as responsible persons who are judged on the basis of their actions. However, it is also expressed in situations such as a patient-doctor conversation, in which agency and thus responsibility is placed with experts, but an extended network of mechanical, institutional and ideological actors is usually excluded or not consciously reflected upon. Now, one might say that this would not be possible otherwise due
to the complexity, that one can never refer to the almost infinite chain of actors and include them in decision-making situations. In my opinion, this is also true, but it should be noted that human action must always be seen as partly sovereign, and thus an at least definable assemblage of human as well as non-human actors - each of whom possesses the same agency - must be included.

Future human-technology networks involving technical and organic actors, such as a brain-computer interface, raise the question of agency and
thus also the critical self-reflection of the idea of an "autonomous self" to an existential level. In currently discussed ideas and plans of companies like Facebook or Neuralink, for example, it goes so far as to speak of brain networks. Collective alliances of complex organic and inorganic actors who want to pair human cognitive processes and integrate them into a neoliberal corporate network. Here, at the latest, it becomes clear that the question of "who is acting here" is very complex to answer on several levels - was it a conscious decision-making process of a brain, of a person, was it the algorithm that interpreted this correctly or only gradually correctly, and which transmission path ultimately led to which world action, and was this an individual decision making process or a decision-making process brought about collectively via a further brain-computer connection?

I am currently doing artistic research on the subject of agency based on Lem's short story "Do you exist, Mr Jones?" In the story, Mr Jones gets
one prosthesis after another replaced in place of his body, until he finally consists only of prostheses. At some point he can no longer pay for the prostheses, so the prosthesis manufacturer sues Mr Jones for the return of the prostheses and drags him to court over the matter. The play I would like to stage as a theatre piece deals with this dispute between Mr. Jones and the prosthesis manufacturer, in that the judge should decide to what extent a prosthetic structure like Mr. Johns can be sued as a "person" at all and thus about the question of "what is the human being" and how we define our human self-image in the course of deep human-machine relationships - indeed, whether a demarcation is possible at all. As part of the artistic research, I tried to transfer the short story to the present and conducted interviews with scientists, those affected and developers. In the "Laboratory for Successful Dependencies" I would like to briefly outline my idea of agency on the basis of the short story and present excerpts from the interviews.